A nonprofit legal group filed a class action lawsuit against Mountain View Regional Medical Center in Las Cruces, alleging that the hospital has illegally sued hundreds of low-income New Mexico patients who should be protected by a new state law from legal action over unpaid bills.
It usually takes a year or more for the supply chain bottlenecks and rising wages that drive up prices to factor into the contracts that dictate what consumers and insurance plans pay.
Elizabeth Huffner thinks it is obvious: A full-term, healthy pregnancy results in a birth.
“When your due date has come and gone, you’re expecting a baby any minute,” Huffner said. So she was surprised to discover she was an “unknown accident” — at least from a billing standpoint — when she went to the hospital during labor. Her bill included a charge for something she said she didn’t know she’d ever entered: an obstetrics emergency department.
That’s where a doctor briefly checked her cervix, timed her contractions, and monitored the fetal heartbeat before telling her to go home and come back later. The area is separated from the rest of the labor-and-delivery department by a curtain. The hospital got about $1,300 for that visit — $530 of it from Huffner’s pocket.
One major part of complying with HIPAA is conducting a risk assessment, and a new release from federal agencies gives you a fresh tool to perform an internal security risk assessment (SRA).
On June 14, OCR announced version 3.3 of the HHS Security Risk Assessment Tool. According to OCR officials, this tool is designed to aid small and medium providers in their efforts to assess security risks. The revamped tool contains a slate of new features, including Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices (HICP) references, file association in Microsoft Windows, improved reports, and other bug fixes and stability improvements.
In 2021, the elements used to determine E/M leveling for office or outpatient visits changed to primarily focus on medical decision-making (MDM) and time. Effective Jan. 1, 2023, the same formula applies to facility-based E/M services: history and exam will no longer be used to select the level of code for hospital inpatients, observation care visits, consultations, ED visits, and nursing facility services along with home, rest home and domiciliary services.
